Shotgun Alley

by Andrew Klavan

  He glanced over at the big detective sidelong, watched him yank the belt tight around his trenchcoat. Fucking Weiss, he thought.

  “It’s just you he’s worried about,” he heard himself say.

  Weiss glanced over at him. “Who? Who’s worried?”

  “Ketchum. That’s why he’s on me all the time. He’s worried I’ll cross the line somehow and drag you down.”

  Weiss just answered with a puff of air, a kind of laugh. “I’ll see you, Jim.”

  He went to the door.

  “Wait a minute,” said Bishop.

  Weiss pulled the door open, looked back across the room, met Bishop’s eyes.

  Bishop couldn’t help himself. He had to ask. “What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “What Ketchum said? You think he’s right?”

  “Right about…?”

  “You think I wanted the takedown to go sour? You think I wanted to blow Cobra away?”

  Weiss made a face, tilted his head. “Who gives a shit what anyone wants? SWAT fucked up and Ketchum knows it.” He seemed about to leave, but paused again, looked back again. “Anyway, you never would’ve pulled the trigger if Tweedy hadn’t fired first.”

  Bishop almost smiled at that but stopped himself. Because what did he care? What did he care what Weiss thought? Fucking Weiss.

  Weiss went out, and the door swung shut behind him.

  Thirty-Seven

  And Weiss moved heavily through the rain. Hunched in his trenchcoat. Pushing through the miserable pissing downpour back to his car. Worse off than when he arrived. Heavy with guilt now and premonitions of disaster.

  He could forgive Bishop his trespasses well enough, but his own plagued him. He should’ve taken the op off the case before the killing started. He should’ve taken him off before he’d gotten entangled with the girl. He should’ve asked if the girl had been at the Market massacre. Sure, he should’ve. It was just greed that stopped him. Greed and ambition. He hadn’t wanted to see what was happening; he hadn’t wanted to know the truth. Because he was greedy for the case to go well, ambitious to please his VIP client. Plus he had a childish hankering to relive his heyday as a cop, to have a hand in bringing Cobra and his gang to justice.

  Now, if the Graham girl was at the Market, if Ketchum got wind of the way things went down, Bishop could get himself charged as an accessory to murder for helping her escape the law. Even Weiss could be guilty of it, guilty of misprision at least. And it didn’t matter a damn if Ketchum thought it was all Bishop dragging Weiss into his psycho universe. It was Weiss who’d fucked up—at least, according to Weiss it was. According to Weiss, it was Weiss himself who’d let the business get out of hand.

  He reached his gray Taurus. Waiting for him at the far corner, dull and dutiful as a wet hound. He huffed and grunted as he squeezed his mountainous body in behind the wheel. He got the engine going, the heater. Sat back. Watched the wipers working for a second or so.

  He hadn’t wanted to know, he thought. He hadn’t wanted to see. And he still didn’t want to. Even now, even right now. In some part of his brain, there was some nagging something…something he was blocking out, something he was refusing to acknowledge, and he just couldn’t get at it. It was something about Honey…about Cobra…Bishop…something that didn’t make sense, that needed to be put together. It was right in front of him. He could feel it. He could feel the looming wrongness of the whole affair.

  But he couldn’t see why it was wrong exactly. Because he didn’t want to see. He didn’t want to know.

  He glanced at the dashboard clock. He sighed. Almost three. He had to get going. He still had his other pair of star-crossed lovers to deal with. He couldn’t put it off anymore.

  He threw the car into gear. Pulled out into the street, cruised to a stop at the traffic light on Telegraph. Sat watching the wipers, watching the rain.

  What a crap day, he thought. First Bishop and now M. R. Brinks. Passion and folly everywhere. And him at the center of it, paralyzed over his own passion, his own folly. Julie Wyant; the Shadowman. Sometimes it felt like life was all salt, and he was just one big wound.

  He drove east, glancing up toward the university as he went through the intersection. It was quiet now at the end of summer, nearly empty in the rain. He went on. Saw only a few students here and there. Small figures bent under backpacks, hidden under poncho hoods. Clutching books and shopping bags and purses to themselves as they trudged through the puddles toward the dorms. All the same, they were young. They were young and he was fifty, and the sight of them made him wistful, regretful, envious, yearning. Their youth underscored his dissatisfaction.

  That’s how he felt as he found Marianne Brinks’s house in the modest streets below College Avenue. It was an old-fashioned stucco cottage on a small lot, houses close by on either side. There was a white fence on the border and white lace curtains on the windows. There was a pleasantly winding stone path dividing the grass before the front door.

  To Weiss—in his sentimental mood—it looked like a picture-perfect suburban home. The kind of happy home he used to see on TV when he was a kid. The kind of home he’d figured other kids in other families had. It looked as if a decorously joyful family of towheaded Episcopalian children and their Episcopalian mom and dad and maybe an Episcopalian golden retriever or something would come pouring out onto the lawn any minute. He could remember hoping that he would one day have a home like that.

  It was sad to think there was just Brinks inside. Poor little Brinks, hunkered alone with her theories and her secret and her closet full of tailored suits. Waiting for him to walk through the door and deliver the news: Her e-mail lover was a dying man whom she despised. It was sad.

  He pulled to the curb out front. Shut off the engine. Sat a minute with his thoughts and his misty frame of mind. His nagging anxiety about this, that and everything. He sure as hell didn’t want to get out and go in there. Break the fierce little feminist’s heart. Tell her the ugly truth. He wished he could leave her fantasies intact a while longer. Give Arnold Freyberg what he wanted, too: a few more days of anonymity so he could die knowing that at least the recipient of his hate mail loved him.

  But Freyberg was not his client. Brinks was. And the truth was the truth. That’s what she’d hired him for.

  He sat another minute, no wisdom forthcoming. And as he sat, a curtain in the house shifted. He caught the motion from the corner of his eye. He turned and saw a dim figure lurking at a downstairs window. It peeked at him, then let the curtain swing back into place.

  Brinks. Waiting for word. Waiting to learn the identity of the man she loved.

  Weiss groaned. What a crap day. He pushed the car door open.

  He got out and walked slowly up the path to the house.

  Thirty-Eight

  “How’d it go?” I asked him later.

  “She wept,” he said. “Like a goddamned baby. She just sat on the sofa and sobbed and carried on.”

  “Because it turned out to be Freyberg or because Freyberg turned out to be dying?”

  “Who the fuck knows? You tell me. She just kept saying, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ What the hell’s she so sorry about?”

  “Beats me. Maybe just for crying like that.”

  “Maybe. She sure as hell couldn’t stop. Boo-hoo-hoo. ‘I’m sorry.’ On and on like that. It’s must’ve been at least half an hour.”

  “Jesus.” I flinched at the mental image. My hostility toward feminism notwithstanding, I hated to see a lady cry. “What’s she gonna do? Will she go talk to him? Call him, at least?”

  He turned over one open hand: a kind of shrug. With the other hand, he swirled the whiskey in his glass. He swiveled in his high-backed chair, frowning, thoughtful.

  I pretended to be thoughtful, too, but really I just didn’t know what to say. I thought I ought to say something. Weiss looked like hell. The encounter with Brinks must’ve been harrowing. I felt I should be able to cheer him up with
a sympathetic remark or two. But I couldn’t think of anything, not anything I felt sure of anyway. With me being basically a kid, and him being Weiss and all, I was desperate not to make a youthful ass out of myself in front of him. So I chickened out finally. Buried my nose in my scotch. Said nothing at all.

  It was one of those nights. When everyone else in the agency was gone. When Weiss would call me into his office. Pull the Macallan bottle out of his desk drawer like a private eye in those old novels I loved. Pour us each a glass. The lighted city stood vast and deep at the high arching windows: the ornate cornice of the building across the street in the foreground, the skewed geometry of the skyline rising up behind. The rush and rumble of late traffic rose to us from far below. The empty hallways and offices all around us made us feel—or made me feel, at least—as if we were two solitary creatures, floating in the darkness there, floating on the little island of lampglow around Weiss’s desk.

  I’ve never really known for sure what Weiss got out of these meetings, what was in them for him. But for me—well, that was something else again. To sit in private conversation with this tough, wise old ex-cop whom I admired and emulated. To get to soak up this character who seemed, like his whiskey bottle, to have stepped whole out of the hardboiled fiction I cut my teeth on. To get a taste, even at second hand, of what I was so hungry for: experience, worldly wisdom, life. For me, these nights were great.

  The silence between us went on a long time, uncomfortably long on my end. Then finally Weiss raised his glass. Tilted the rim my way. Smelled the good malt and tasted it and went “Ah!” He studied the whiskey’s amber depths. He gave a world-weary little laugh, just for himself. And he said, “Sweet mystery of love, right?”

  Oh, how I wanted to respond in kind. To say something equally wry and terse and ex-coplike, man to man, as if all the big philosophical stuff were already understood between us and there was no need to spell any of it out.

  “You know what it’s like?” I said. “It’s like computers, isn’t it? Like the way computers work: binary numbers. All you have is those two kinds of numbers, ones and zeros. But out of that comes this whole unfathomable…everything.”

  I thought that was pretty clever. An elegant little metaphor with a built-in visual joke—you know: men and women, ones and zeros.

  But no. Weiss screwed up his mouth. He snorted. It was too complicated, too academic, too much for him to work out this late in the day.

  I was crestfallen, chagrined. What an idiot I was! What a stupid eggheaded, geeky thing to say!

  But then—miraculously—Weiss got it. I could see it happen. He kind of lifted his chin and half-smiled to himself.

  “Ones and zeros,” he said into his glass. “That’s good. I like that. Ones and zeros, definitely. They taught you something in college, anyway.”

  “A little,” I said, in that same sardonic tone. But I was thrilled not to have screwed up the moment. I was gratified beyond telling.

  “I guess a lot of times, we oughta just keep our ones in our pants, huh,” said Weiss.

  I laughed. “Yeah, but those zeros.”

  He laughed. “Right. Right. Those zeros. You gotta be careful about those zeros.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Hey, I will.” he said. “You bet your ass I will.” He made his fingers into a gun and fired it at me. “You can fall right into some of those zeros, my friend, so deep you never get out.”

  I laughed again—but then I stopped laughing. Hey, I thought, did he mean that personally? And Yeah, I decided, he did. Which meant he knew about me and Sissy. Well, of course he knew. The way she hung around my desk and draped herself all over me. The whole Agency probably knew by now. Which meant the whole Agency probably knew that my sex life had turned into a long, descending dance in which I and my lust and my cowardice alternated places as we waltzed ourselves into perdition.

  It was perdition. That’s what it was. I couldn’t bring myself to break it off with her. She called me “baby-lamb.” She called me “little sweetie.” We’d been together just under two weeks, and she’d begun to wonder aloud if we would spend “the next fifty years” together. I wanted to kill her—but I couldn’t bring myself to break it off.

  Every night, I was in her bed. Most mornings, too. And I won’t say it wasn’t educational. For all her candied sweet talk and her mommy mannerisms, she’d lived at least ten more years than I had. She’d had time enough to acquire a mind-boggling knowledge of the human anatomy and to overcome any embarrassment about passing that knowledge on. So exotic and compelling were these informational exchanges that I would lose myself in them entirely and plumb forget my intention of telling her that I was in love with another woman. Which I was, in fact. I was in love with Emma McNair.

  I had met Emma only that once. But the connection, as I’ve already told, verged on the mystical. Every day I made plans to call the number she had given me and every day I told myself that, no, I couldn’t do that until I had honorably broken it off with Sissy. So every day I vowed to honorably break it off with Sissy and every night I found myself inserted instead into some new opening in her or linked with her in some hitherto unimagined position the very originality of which seemed to hold me in a trancelike thrall. Not to mention the orgasms, which were nitroglycerinesque. I mean, the woman was fucking my brains out.

  But the truth is I would rather have stared at Emma McNair across a crowded room than have even the wildest conjugation with Sissy. No, wait a minute, that’s not the truth. The truth is: The moment after I finished the wildest conjugation with Sissy, I continually found myself wishing that I had plunked instead for staring at Emma across a crowded room. Or doing almost anything with Emma, rather than consigning myself once again to the relentless cootchie-coo, snookie-ookum horseshit with which Sissy was mothering me nearly to death.

  I don’t mean to delay the main story with these laments about my youthful shenanigans, but, as things turned out, it all sort of played into what happened next.

  Because, embarrassed, I mumbled, “Yeah, you can’t always tell what you’re getting yourself into, can you?”

  And Weiss said, “Well, that’s it, that’s just it.” He poked his finger into the desktop. “You can’t tell shit. That’s right. You never know what the hell is going on, who the hell you’re dealing with. I mean, look at this Brinks woman. She’s sitting there crying like that. Because why? What did she do? She got these letters. She fell in love with this guy in these letters. But she didn’t know him. She just made him up in her head. She just fell in love with this guy she made up in her head and now she’s sitting there crying boo-hoo because this Freyberg guy isn’t the guy she made up.” He raised his scotch glass to his lips. He looked across the rim of it, out beyond the lampglow into the office shadows. “I mean, it’s all like that, isn’t it?” he said softly. “I mean, that’s pretty much all it is.”

  It seemed we were no longer talking about me and Sissy. In fact, I wasn’t sure, but I suspected we were no longer talking about M. R. Brinks and Arnold Freyberg. Weiss at this point had not confided in me all that much about his personal life, but I’d already seen enough to understand some of it. I’d deduced for myself his romantic nature. And I had spied him more than once, alone in his office, staring at the ten-second video of Julie Wyant on his computer, that ten-second loop that was everything he had of her. So I wondered if that’s what was on his mind. Her image, his feeling for her. Whether it was worth risking the dangers of searching for her in the flesh. Or whether he had simply “made somone up in his head,” like Brinks, and would be left, like her, to cry boo-hoo.

  “What do you think, Professor?” He was still gazing into the darkness. But then he drank. Then he swiveled to face me. “You’re the resident genius here. That’s pretty much the whole deal, right? A bunch of ones and zeros making stuff up about each other.”

  The question caught me completely off guard. A question that real, that deep from a man like Weiss. How could I answer him? Wha
t could I say that wouldn’t make me sound like some know-nothing bookworm just out of college? Which, of course, was what I was.

  My lips parted and my mind raced. And the traffic whisper from the street below, and the city at the window, and the empty halls and offices all around us, gave me that strange sense that he and I were in the dimly lit center of things and that what I said next mattered somehow more than I understood. It wasn’t just that I wanted to impress him, it was that—well, the subject had been on my mind of late. It connected with other things I’d been thinking about, things that had been going through my head ever since that night at Carlo’s when I had talked with the graduate students and with Emma McNair.

  Looking back, I can see that the nonsense those students had spoken and Emma’s practical response had begun in me the chain of thought that would develop into what you might call my outlook, the holistic philosophy that would come to guide my writing and set me in opposition to the fashionable theories of my day. The jist of it was that the inner life—the imagination or the spirit, if you will—is not some trick of culture or upbringing or even genetics, but an actual different order of reality. This imagination, I would come to believe, was a Thing Entire, as powerful a factor in the workings of the world as a bullet or a rose. Yet somehow it had become invisible to our modern intellectual elite, so enamored of scientific analysis that they were blind to what could only be experienced whole. They clung to the mere material and explained everything else away, so that when they looked at love—as when they looked at literature or prayer—they were like children baffled by one of those optical-illusion drawings: They saw the two profiled faces but couldn’t make out the grail formed in between.

  That’s what I’d been thinking about since my night in Carlo’s, and that’s what I was thinking about now. But, of course, I couldn’t say any of it. Not out loud. Not to Weiss. “For fuck’s sake,” he would’ve answered, or words to that effect, “what is this philosophical shit?” And I would’ve been ridiculed as a callow Poindexter around the Agency for weeks.